Henrik Ibsen by Edmund Gosse (page 2)

and humiliating termination was brought in the following August.

In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his native country. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Duepper alone stood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Luebeck and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the arms of its antique repose. “Here at last,” he wrote to Bjoernson, “there is blessed peace,” and he settled himself down to the close contemplation of poetry.

The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter to the glow and splendor of Italy acted on the poet’s spirit like an enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome’s “azure sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music,” and at first the contrast between the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almost intolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air and become as a little child. There has scarcely been another example of a writer of the first class who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but debarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, has been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart of unclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Shelley and Keats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen broke free from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his life, was closing his romantic career.

Ibsen’s earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomed to at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The passion of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered among the vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modern life, or their original significance. He missed the impress of the individual on classic sculpture, as he had missed it–the parallel is strange, but his own–on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He liked a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt more at home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architects than with artists of a more archaic type. Shelley, we may remember, labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets the attractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavor of the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen’s admiration of a certain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worth recording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who made that might have made the moon in his leisure moments.

During the first few months of Ibsen’s life in Rome all was chaos in his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend. In September, 1864, he tells Bjoernson that he is at work on a poem of considerable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_, which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns call it, an “epic” poem; although a sketch for the _Julianus Apostata_ was already forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would, sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife and little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that Michelangelo’s “Moses” was there, and though he was weary with longing to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen’s nature were loosened. His soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the aching maladies of its youth.

He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress. But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of his country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude and gloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded, sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, and already as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. But two things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a passionate enthusiasm for their art, and a rebellious attitude towards their immediate precursors in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. The friendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest of their lives, for it was founded on a common basis.

A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusing impression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, Christian Molbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wandering silently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets of his invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation by his sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering the ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries by a running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhat unsympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a more agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills, planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and self- contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of these periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end of September he had completed it.

_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and the graceful wit of _Love’s Comedy_ was so great as to be startling. Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations are powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery from being perceived at once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not exist, for those who had eyes to see, and who were not blinded by prejudice, it was plain that a very great writer had arisen in Norway at last. Bjoernson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862) was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart in Scotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of clearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and some shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme, there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as manifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as it is surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed, but in its own peculiar province it has not been approached. It bears some remote likeness to _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in the literature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, of course, _Peer Gynt_.

For a long while it was supposed that the difficulties in the way of performing _Brand_ on the public stage were too great to be overcome. But the task was attempted at length, first in Stockholm in 1895; and within the last few years this majestic spectacle has been drawn in full before the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow and elsewhere. In spite of the timid reluctance of managers, wherever this play is adequately presented, it captures an emotional public at a run. It is an appeal against moral apathy which arouses the languid. It is a clear and full embodiment of the gospel of energy which awakens and upbraids the weak. In the original, its rush of rhymes produces on the nerves an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as an oration, it is responded to as a great civic appeal; if as a sermon, it is sternly religious, and fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain air, with vague bells ringing high up among the glaciers, no one asks exactly what _Brand_ expounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent. Witnessed on the living stage, it takes the citadel of the soul by storm. When it is read, the critical judgment becomes cooler.

Carefully examined, _Brand_ is found to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, “Is _Brand_ the expression of Ibsen’s own nature?” Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yet he was careful to remain outside. Ibsen, as we have already pointed out, was ready in later life to discuss his own writings, and what he said about them is often dangerously mystifying. He told Georg Brandes that the religious vocation of Brand was not essential. “I could have applied the whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest.” (He was to deal with each of these alternations later on, but with what a difference!) “I could quite as well,” he persisted, “have worked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for instance, as my hero–assuming, of course, that Galileo should stand firm and never concede the fixity of the earth–or you yourself in your struggle with the Danish reactionaries.” This is not to the point, since in fact neither Georg Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama, could have produced such a capacity for evolution as is presented by the stern priest whose absolute certitude, although founded, one admits, on no rational theory of theology, is yet of the very essence of religion.

Brand becomes intelligible when we regard him as a character of the twelfth century transferred to the nineteenth. He has something of Peter the Hermit in him. He ought to have been a crusading Christian king, fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city of God. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord, like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey in the desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any reference to accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religious conventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violent and incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants, but it must be an upheaval of all that exists, and it must bring Man into closer contact with God. Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is finally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church.

The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand with that extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbe Jules_ of Octave Mirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession of crises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weakness is the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developed what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception of such a rebel’s ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers or Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest of insurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track of his colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to the commentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, and endless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and analyze its forms.

There is, however, another than the priestly side. The poem contains a great deal of superficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporary Scandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing in Christiania, of a crafty court in Stockholm, and of Denmark stretching her bleeding hands to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton’s songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. “It is Will alone that matters,” and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his motto “All or Nothing,” persistently, almost tiresomely, like a modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea. More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not white- bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran theologians, a prototype of violent strength.

Yet Brand’s own mission remains undefined to him–if it ever takes exact shape–until Agnes reveals it to him:–

Choose thy endless loss or gain! Do thy work and bear thy pain. …
Now (he answers) I see my way aright. In _ourselves_ is that young Earth, Ripe for the divine new-birth.

And it is in Agnes–as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience endures all the cruelties of her husband’s fanaticism–it is in Agnes that Ibsen’s genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure, Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are the delicate offspring of Italy.

Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which saw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen, and the poet’s audience was thus very considerably widened. The satire of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexels preached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _The Daughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were analyzed. Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light and shade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of _Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it took its place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few books which continued, and still continue, steadily to sell. It has always been, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the most popular of all Ibsen’s writings.

This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniary fortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like _Brand_, in the conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not much exceed L100. Hardly had Ibsen become the object of universal discussion than he found himself assailed, as never before, by the paralysis of poverty. He could not breathe, he could not move; he could not afford to buy postage stamps to stick upon his business letters. He was threatened with the absolute extinction of his resources. At the very time when Copenhagen was ringing with his praise Ibsen was borrowing money for his modest food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome.

In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly nervous condition, in the midst of which he was assailed by a malarious fever which brought him within sight of the grave. To the agony of his devoted wife, he lay for some time between life and death, and the extreme poverty from which they suffered made it difficult, and even impossible, for her to provide for him the alleviations which his state demanded. He gradually recovered, however, thanks to his wife’s care and to his own magnificent constitution, but the springs of courage seemed to have snapped within his breast.

In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote a letter to Bjoernson, “my one and only friend,” which is one of the most heart-rending documents in the history of literature. Few great spirits have been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits’ end to know what to advise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway, describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously came the manifest success of _Brand_, and, for the first time, the Norwegian press recognized the poet’s merit. There was a general movement in his favor; King Carl graciously received his petition of April 15, and on May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a “poet’s pension,” restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs.

The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where he found it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills. He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo Gratiosi, two thousand feet above the sea. Thither he came, with his wife and his little son, and there he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him. He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted himself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which he described as to be “a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of _modern_ Norway.”

He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually composed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothly until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia. His own account was: “After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_, as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at Sorrento. So far away from one’s readers one becomes reckless. This poem contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth. My own mother–with the necessary exaggeration–served as the model for Ase.” _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen. None of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ now afflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published in November, 1867.

In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _Peer Gynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it made no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. “They have discovered,” he said, “much more satire in _Peer Gynt_ than was intended by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I wrote it.” It has been, however, the misfortune of Ibsen that he has particularly attracted the attention of those who prefer to see anything in a poem except its poetry, and who treat all tulips and roses as if they were cabbages for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it is surprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovely poem shaking the bauble of its fool’s cap at them, there can still be commentators who see nothing in _Peer Gynt_ but the “awful interest of the universal problems with which it deals.” This obsession of the critic to discover “problems” in the works of Ibsen has been one of the main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long black coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of the Nonconformist conscience.

Casting aside, therefore, the spurious “lessons” and supposititious “problems” of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above everything else which we see in _Peer Gynt_ we see its fun and its picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted admirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst of lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carried along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet’s genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boeig, gigantic gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anything else written since the second part of _Faust_. The third act, culminating with the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of Ase, is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts Ibsen in the first rank of creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt and grotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I think, a lower order of imagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in the poem, often seems divided from it in tone, style and direction, and is more like a symbolic or mythical gloss upon the first three acts than a contribution to the growth of the general story.

Throughout this tangled and variegated scene the spirits of the author remain almost preposterously high. If it were all hilarity and sardonic laughter, we should weary of the strain. But physical beauty of the most enchanting order is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony. It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere to the dramatic literature of the world, not by Shakespeare himself, is there introduced into a play so much loveliness of scenery, and such varied and exquisite appeal to the eyes, as there is in _Peer Gynt_. The fifth act contains much which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene so full of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing else in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter’s brush has contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls there is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian paintings, Dahl’s “Birch in a Snow Storm.” Pages might be filled with praise of the picturesqueness of tableau after tableau in each act of _Peer Gynt_.

The hero is the apotheosis of selfish vanity, and he is presented to us, somewhat indecisively, as the type of one who sets at defiance his own life’s design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or even a successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote the first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical class of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen’s invention; he found it in those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjoernson and Moe, in which he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Boeig, a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_, which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to a justification of the moral or “problem” purpose, which Ibsen’s graver prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act, where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs and tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their reproaches.

_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment, and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as _Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it did not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules must be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. “My book,” he wrote, “_is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry is shall be made to fit my book.” There was a struggle at first against this assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is now generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic intellectual caprices.

[Note.–By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_ all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.]

CHAPTER V

1868-75

Ibsen’s four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia dreaming of Italian liberty. _Casa Guidi Windows_ may be taken as the extreme type of the way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He sought there, and found, under the transparent azure of the Alban sky, in the harmonious murmurs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the mountains, above all in the gray streets of Rome, that rest of the brain, that ripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after his rough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his attitude of passive appreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like any other of the illustrious exiles–Landor, who died in Florence a few days after Ibsen settled in Rome. There was a side of character, too, on which the young Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius.

When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Garibaldi, at Genoa, announced his intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet’s heart “by rose hung river and light-foot rill,” but left Ibsen simply disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the French who entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed sojourn–for he soon determined that if there was going to be civil war in Italy that country was no home for him–we hear but little. This autumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career of Georg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whom he was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we notice the beginnings of a difference with Bjoernson, lamentable and hardly explicable, starting, it would vaguely seem, out of a sense that Bjoernson did not appreciate the poetry of _Peer Gynt_ at its due value. Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Heiberg, had been looked upon as the _doyen_ of Danish critics–had pronounced against the poetry of _Peer Gynt_, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods, in a bearish letter, had thrown the blame of this judgment upon Bjoernson.

All through these last months in Rome we find Ibsen in the worst of humors. If it be admissible to compare him with an animal, he seems the badger among the writers of his time, nocturnal, inoffensive, solitary, but at the rumor of disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and bite with terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen was no joke, and in moments of exasperation he bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Among other snaps of the pen, he told Bjoernson that if he was not taken seriously as a poet, he should try his “fate as a photographer.” Bjoernson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him to put his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsen himself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and all the benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidly forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorations from kings and ministers; Bjoernson having determined to reject all such gewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of accepting (and wearing) every cross and star that was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, the temptation was wholly problematical in both cases, yet each poet acted on his determination to the end. But Bjoernson’s hint about the comedy seems to have been, for some years, the last flicker of friendship between the two. On this Ibsen presently acted in a manner very offensive to Bjoernson.

In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be very much indeed incensed with things in general. “What Norway wants is a national disaster,” he amiably snarled. It was high time that the badger should seek shelter in a new burrow, and in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There was a farewell banquet, at which Julius Lange, who was present, remarks that Ibsen showed a spice of the devil, but “was very witty and amiable.” He went to Florence for June, then quitted Italy altogether, settling for three months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little “sunbath” in the Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he started his five-act comedy, _The League of Youth_. All September he spent in Munich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden, which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at once he sank down again into his brooding mood of isolation and quietism, roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he hail haunted those of Rome, by night or at unfrequented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors, writing few letters, slowly finishing his “photographic” comedy, which he did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although he was still very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write for journals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at long intervals, with finished works of importance.

It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all Ibsen’s mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as “the local conditions” or “situation.” The play is all concerned with _de lokale forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being, as Mr. Archer has said, “the first prose comedy of any importance in Norwegian literature,” [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Bjoernson’s _The Newly Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of Youth_ was a “placable” piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of “de lokale forhold.” When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry, Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the manners of their “pernicious and lie-steeped clique.” He was always something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims.

Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult for an outsider–so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of Copenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of _The League of Youth_ are old history now. There was the “liberal” element in Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and more hampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence of Soeren Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views, who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any pensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen.

Now Bjoernson, in the development of his career as a political publicist, had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideas and this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense before Jaabaek, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of Dresden, genuinely believed that Bjoernson, with his ardor and his energy and his eloquence, war, becoming a national danger. We have seen that Bjoernson had piqued Ibsen’s vanity about _Peer Gynt_, and nothing exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bjoernson was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Bjoernson must always be leading the majority, Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. They were doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by creating the figure of Stensgaard, in _The League of Youth_, a frothy and mischievous demagogue whose rhetoric irresistibly reminded every one of Bjoernson’s rolling oratory. What Bjoernson, not without dignity, objected to was not so much the personal attack, as that the whole play attempted “to paint our young party of liberty as a troop of pushing, phrase-mongering adventurers, whose patriotism lay solely in their words.” Ibsen acknowledged that that was exactly his opinion of them, and what could follow for such a disjointed friendship but anger and silence?

The year 1869, which we now enter, is remarkable in the career of Ibsen as being that in which he travelled most, and appeared on the surface of society in the greatest number of capacities. He was enabled to do this by a considerable increase in his pension. First of all, he was induced to pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being seized with a sudden strong desire to study conditions in Sweden, a country which he had hitherto professed to dislike. He had a delightful stay of two months, received from King Carl the order of the Wasa, was feted at banquets, renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bjoernson were how beginning to be recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined. It was doubtless Bjoernson’s emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest at the opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden incursion of an Oriental potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that illustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony. The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian guest being Professor J. D. C. Lieblein, the Egyptologist.

The poet started for Egypt, by Dresden and Paris, on September 28. _The League of Youth_ was published on the 29th, and first performed on October 18; Ibsen, therefore, just missed the scandal and uproar caused by the play in Norway. In company with eighty-five other people, all illustrious guests of the Khedive, and under the care of Mariette Bey, Ibsen made a twenty-four days’ expedition up the Nile into Nubia, and then back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on November 17, in the company of an empress and several princes of the blood, he saw the Canal formally opened and graced a grand processional fleet that sailed out from Port Said towards Ismaila. But on the quay at Port Said Ibsen’s Norwegian mail was handed to him, and letters and newspapers alike were full of the violent scenes in the course of which _The League of Youth_ had been hissed down at Christiania. Then and there he sent his defiance back to Norway in _At Port Said_, one of the most pointed and effective of all his polemical lyrics. A version in literal prose must suffice, though it does cruel injustice to the venomous melody of the original:

The dawn of the Eastern Land
Over the haven glittered;
Flags from all corners of the globe Quivered from the masts.
Voices in music
Bore onward the cantata;
A thousand cannon
Christened the Canal.

The steamers passed on
By the obelisk.
In the language of my home
Came to me the chatter of news. The mirror-poem which I had polished For masculine minxes
Had been smeared at home
By splutterings from penny whistles.

The poison-fly stung;
It made my memories loathsome.
Stars, be thanked!–
My home is what is ancient!
We hailed the frigate
From the roof of the river-boat; I waved my hat
And saluted the flag.

To the feast, to the feast,
In spite of the fangs of venomous reptiles! A selected guest
Across the Lakes of Bitterness! At the close of day
Dreaming, I shall slumber
Where Pharaoh was drowned–
And when Moses passed over.

In this mood of defiance, with rage unabated, Ibsen returned home by Alexandria and Paris, and was in Dresden again in December.

The year of 1870 drove him out of Dresden, as the French occupation had driven him out of Rome. It was essential for him to be at rest in the midst of a quiet and alien population. He was drawn towards Denmark, partly for the sake of talk with Brandes, who had now become a factor in his life, partly to arrange about the performance of one of his early works, and in particular of _The Pretenders_. No definite plan, however, had been formed, when, in the middle of June, war was declared between Germany and France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony, and settled for three months in Copenhagen, where his reception was charmingly sympathetic. By the beginning of October, after the fall of Strasburg and the hemming in of Metz, however, it was plain on which side the fortunes of the war would lie, and Ibsen returned “as from a rejuvenating bath” of Danish society to a Dresden full of French prisoners, a Dresden, too, suffering terribly from the paralysis of trade, and showing a plentiful lack of enthusiasm for Prussia.

Ibsen turned his back on all such vexatious themes, and set himself to the collecting and polishing of a series of lyrical poems, the _Digte_ of 1871, the earliest, and, indeed, the only such collection that he published. We may recollect that, at the very same moment, with far less cause to isolate himself from the horrors of war, Theophile Gautier was giving the last touches to _Emaux et Camees_. In December, 1870, Ibsen addressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his “Balloon-Letter,” a Hudibrastic rhymed epistle in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a good deal that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminiscences of his trip through Egypt, and some powerful ironic references to the caravan of German invaders, with its Hathor and its Horus, which was then rushing to the assault of Paris under the doleful colors of the Prussian flag. Ibsen’s sarcasms are all at the ugliness and prosaic utilitarianism of the Germans; “Moltke,” he says, “has killed the poetry of battles.”

Ibsen was now greatly developing and expanding his views, and forming a world-policy of his own. The success of German discipline deeply impressed him, and he thought that the day had probably dawned which would be fatal to all revolt and “liberal rebellion” for the future. More than ever he dreaded the revolutionary doctrines of men like Jaabaek and Bjoernson, which would lead, he thought, to bloodshed and national disaster. The very same events were impressing Goldwin Smith at the very same moment with his famous prophecy that the abolition of all dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with “the tranquil inauguration” of elective industrial governments throughout the world. So history moves doggedly on, _propheten rechts, propheten links_, a perfectly impassive _welt-kind_ in the middle of them. In Copenhagen Ibsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long and dangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with this still unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. To Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely than to any one else about the great events which were shaking the face of Europe and occupying so much of both their thoughts:–

The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December 20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new age. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high time they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented Guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand, and therefore, I hate them. They want their own special revolutions–revolutions in externals, in politics and so forth. But all this is mere trifling. What is all-important is the revolution of the Spirit of Man.

This revolution, as exemplified by the Commune in Paris, did not satisfy the anticipations which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took advantage of this to tell him that he .had not yet studied politics minutely enough from the scientific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did not possess as knowledge came to him, to a certain degree, as intuition or instinct. “Let this be as it may, the poet’s essential task is to see, not to reflect. For me in particular there would be danger in too much reflection.” Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame of mind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of which his imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; at another time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, and to represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presents them to him. In neither attitude, however, is there discernible any trace of the moral physician, and this is the central distinction between Tolstoi and Ibsen, whose methods, at first sight, sometimes appear so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition, but always with the purpose, if he can, of curing it; Ibsen gives it even closer clinical attention, but he leaves to others the care of removing a disease which his business is solely to diagnose.

The _Poems_, after infinite revision, were published at length, in a very large edition, on May 3, 1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad to get this book off his hands was that it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts on the great drama he had been projecting, at intervals, for seven years past, the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story of Julian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) and found the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss, Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen’s early and insufficiently protected writings. This exacerbated the poet’s dislike to his own country, where the very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subject he used language of tiresome over-emphasis. “From Sweden, from Denmark, from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is from Norway that everything bad comes upon me.” It was indicated to would-be Norwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegian friends, he said, were “a costly luxury” which he was obliged to deny himself.

The First Part of _Julian_ was finished on Christmas Day, but it took over a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, was completed. “A Herculean labor,” the author called it, when he finally laid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very quietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tempered by genial visits from some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularly Hans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formal intercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; all this time, let us remember, no Norwegians–“by request.” The summer was spent in long rambles over the mountains of Austria, ending up with a month of deep repose in Berchtesgaden. The next year was like unto this, except that its roaming, restless summer closed with several months in Vienna; and on October 17, 1873, _nonum in annum_, after the Horatian counsel, the prodigious masterpiece, _Emperor and Galilean_, was published in Copenhagen at last.

Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise and fall of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is not difficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the most speculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquity that fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians have celebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose which were combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship. There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet. His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen’s correspondence of the difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to the theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself baffled by the paradoxes which he encountered, and by the contradictions of a figure seen darkly through a mist of historical detraction.

He met these difficulties as well as he could, and as a prudent dramatic poet should, by close and observant study of the document. He endeavored to reconcile the evident superiority of Julian with the absurd eccentricities of his private manners and with the futility of his public acts. He noted all the Apostate’s foibles by the side of his virtues and his magnanimities. He traced without hesitation the course of that strange insurrection which hurled a coarse fanatic from the throne, only to place in his room a literary pedant with inked fingers and populous beard. He accepted everything, from the parasites to the purple slippers. The dangers of so humble an attendance upon history were escaped with success in the first instalment of his “world drama.” In the strong and mounting scenes of _Caesar’s Apostacy_, the rapidity with which the incidents succeed one another, their inherent significance, the innocent splendor of Julian’s mind in its first emancipation from the chains of false faith, combine to produce an effect of high dramatic beauty. Georg Brandes, whose instinct in such matters was almost infallible, when he read the First Part shortly after its composition, entreated Ibsen to give this, as it stood, to the public, and to let _The Emperor Julian’s End_ follow independently. Had Ibsen consented to do this, _Caesar’s Fall_ would certainly take a higher place among his works than it does at present, when its effect is somewhat amputated and its meaning threatened with incoherence by the author’s apparent _volteface_ in the Second Part.

It was a lifelong disappointment to Ibsen that _Emperor and Galilean_, on which he expended far more consideration and labor than on any other of his works, was never a favorite either with the public or among the critics. With the best will in the world, however, it is not easy to find full enjoyment in this gigantic work, which by some caprice of style defiant of analysis, lacks the vitality which is usually characteristic of Ibsen’s least production. The speeches put into the mouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid; as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian’s own teacher Libanius, “You feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk.” The scheme of Ibsen’s drama was too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt. What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here and there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramatic representation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius far better to have abandoned any attempt to write a conclusive history, and have selected some critical moment in the life of Julian. He should rather have concentrated his energies, independent of the chroniclers, on the resuscitation of that episode, and in the course of it have trembled less humbly under the uplifted finger of Ammianus.

Of _Emperor and Galilean_ Ibsen afterwards said: “It was the first” (but he might have added “the only”) “poem which I have written under the influence of German ideas.” He was aware of the danger of living too long away from his own order of thought and language. But it was always difficult for him, once planted in a place, to pull up his roots. A weariness took possession of him after the publication of his double drama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks a central joint in the structure of his career, what the architects call a “channel” in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen’s work an aspect of solidity and resource. During these years he revised some of his early writings, made a closer study of the arts of sculpture and painting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a very brief sojourn in Norway. In the spring of 1875 he definitely moved with his family from Dresden to Munich.

The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved very unfortunate. Ibsen was suspicious, the Norwegians of that generation were constitutionally stiff and reserved; long years among Southern races had accustomed him to a plenitude in gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief time he was in Norway, from an intolerable _malaise_. Ten years afterwards, in writing to Bjoernson, the discomfort of that experience was still unallayed. “I have not yet saved nearly enough,” he said, “to support myself and my family in the case of my discontinuing my literary work. And I should be obliged to discontinue it if I lived in Christiania. … This simply means that I should not write at all. When, ten years ago, after an absence of ten years, I sailed up the fjord, I felt a weight settling down on my breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression. And this feeling lasted all the time I was at home; I was not myself under the stare of all those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the windows and in the streets.”

Ibsen had now been more than ten years am exile from Norway, and his sentiments with regard to his own people were still what they were when, in July, 1872, he had sent home his _Ode for the Millenary Festival_. That very striking poem, one of the most solid of Ibsen’s lyrical performances, had opened in the key of unmitigated defiance to popular opinion at home. It was intended to show Norwegians that they must alter their attitude towards him, as he would never change his behavior towards them. “My countrymen,” he said:–

My countrymen, who filled for me deep bowls Of wholesome bitter medicine, such as gave The poet, on the margin of his grave, Fresh force to fight where broken twilight rolls,– My countrymen, who sped me o’er the wave, An exile, with my griefs for pilgrim-soles, My fears for burdens, doubts for staff, to roam,– From the wide world I send you greeting home.

I send you thanks for gifts that help and harden, Thanks for each hour of purifying pain; Each plant that springs in my poetic garden Is rooted where your harshness poured its rain; Each shoot in which it blooms and burgeons forth It owes to that gray weather from the North; The sun relaxes, but the fog secures!
My country, thanks! My life’s best gifts were yours.

In spite of these sardonic acknowledgments. Ibsen’s fame in Norway, though still disputed, was now secure. In Denmark and Sweden it was almost unchallenged, and he was a name, at least, in Germany. In England, since 1872, he had not been without a prophet. But in Italy, Russia, France–three countries upon the intelligence of which he was presently to make a wide and durable impression–he was still quite unknown.

Meanwhile, in glancing over the general literature of Europe, we see his figure, at the threshold of his fiftieth year, taking greater and greater prominence. He had become, in the sudden exinction of the illustrious old men of Denmark, the first living writer of the North. He was to Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne or Rossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at least till 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If, in the second portion of his career, he resolutely deprived himself of all indulgence in the ornament of verse, it was a voluntary act of austerity. It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging the crown of jewels for the coarse brown cowl of St. Jerome. And now, after a year or two of prayer and fasting, Ibsen began a new intellectual career. CHAPTER VI

1875-82

While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Bjoernson suddenly swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid modern life. This was his first attempt at that “photography by comedy” which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded what was Ibsen’s comment on these two plays, and particularly on _A Bankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bjoernson had carried a very spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities.

Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen upon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a year he gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, he was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of inanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_, which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique in the fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all.

Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the exteriors of character. With his fiftieth year he presents himself as no more the Poet, but the Man of Business. Molbech told me that at this time the velveteen jacket, symbol of the dear delays of art, was discarded in favor of a frock- coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rather shyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself in frequent straits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollar breeding. He cast the suspicion of poetry from him, and with his gold spectacles, his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom and his quick staccato step, he adopted the pose of a gentleman of affairs, very positive and with no nonsense about him.

He had long determined on the wilful abandonment of poetic form, and the famous statement made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must be quoted, although it is well known, since it contains the clearest of all the explanations by which Ibsen justified his new departure:–

You are of opinion that the drama [_Emperor and Galilean_] ought to have been written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here I must differ from you. The play is, as you will have observed, conceived in the most realistic style: the illusion I wished to produce is that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed verse, I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural colors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desire to see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation; what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk “the language of the Gods.”

This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, “Mais, helas! cette piece est en vers, et l’ennui s’y promene librement entre les rimes.”

No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held so rigidly to his intention of reproducing the exact language of real life, as did Ibsen in the series of plays which opens with _The Pillars of Society_. This drama was published in Copenhagen in October, 1877, and was acted almost immediately in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; it had the good fortune to be taken up warmly in Germany. What Ibsen’s idea was, in the new sort of realistic drama which he was inventing, was, in fact, perceived at once by German audiences, although it was not always approved of. He was the guest of the theatromaniac Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and _The Pillars of Society_ was played in many parts of Germany. In Scandinavia the book of the play sold well, and the piece had some success on the boards, but it did not create anything like so much excitement as the author had hoped that it would. Danish taste pronounced it “too German.”

For the fact that _The Pillars of Society_, except in Scandinavia and Germany, did not then, and never has since, taken a permanent hold upon the theatre, Mr. William Archer gives a reason which cannot be controverted, namely, that by the time the other foreign publics had fully awakened to the existence of Ibsen, he himself had so far outgrown the phase of his development marked by _Pillars of Society_, that the play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suited the German public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with their theatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical intelligence of the Anglo-American public, and … below that of the French public. This is of course an exaggeration. What I mean is that there was no possible reason why the countrymen of Augier and Dumas should take any special interest in _Pillars of Society_. It was not obviously in advance of these masters in technical skill, and the vein of Teutonic sentiment running through it could not greatly appeal to the Parisian public of that period.

The subject of _The Pillars of Society_ was the hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have fallen out of touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied in the convex mirror of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to _The Pillars of Society_ that in it, as little as in _The League of Youth_, had Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the well-made play. Gloomy and homely as are the earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the “well- made” play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very much of the usual “bless-ye-my-children” order. The loss of the Indian Girl is miraculously prevented, and at the end the characters are solemnized and warned, yet are left essentially none the worse for their alarm. This, unfortunately, is not the mode in which the sins of scheming people find them out in real life. But to the historical critic it is very interesting to see Bjoernson and Ibsen nearer one another in _A Bankruptcy_ and _The Pillars of Society_ than they had ever been before. They now started on a course of eager, though benevolent, rivalry which was eminently to the advantage of each of them.

No feature of Ibsen’s personal career is more interesting than his relation to Bjoernson. Great as the genius of Ibsen was, yet, rating it as ungrudgingly as possible, we have to admit that Bjoernson’s character was the more magnetic and more radiant of the two. Ibsen was a citizen of the world; he belonged, in a very remarkable degree, to the small class of men whose intelligence lifts them above the narrowness of local conditions, who belong to civilization at large, not to the system of one particular nation. He was, in consequence, endowed, almost automatically, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a central point; if he was to be limited at all, he might be styled European, although, perhaps, few Western citizens would have had less difficulty than he in making themselves comprehended by a Chinese, Japanese or Indian mind of unusual breadth and cultivation. On the other hand, in accepting the advantages of this large mental outlook, he was forced to abandon those of nationality. No one can say that Ibsen was, until near the end of his life, a good Norwegian, and he failed, by his utterances, to vibrate the local mind. But Bjoernson, with less originality, was the typical patriot in literature, and what he said, and thought, and wrote was calculated to stir the local conscience to the depths of its being.

When, therefore, in 1867, Ibsen, who was bound by all natural obligations and tendencies to remain on the best terms with Bjoernson, allowed the old friendship between them to lapse into positive antagonism, he was following the irresistible evolution of his fate, as Bjoernson was following his. It was as inevitable that Ibsen should grow to his full height in solitude as it was that Bjoernson should pine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of popular meetings, torchlight processions of students and passionate appeals to local sentiment. Trivial causes, such as those which we have chronicled earlier, might seem to lead up to a division, but that division was really inherent in the growth of the two men.

Ibsen, however, was not wholly a gainer at first even in genius, by the separation. It cut him off from Norway too entirely, and it threw him into the arms of Germany. There were thirteen years in which Ibsen and Bjoernson were nothing to one another, and these were not years of unmingled mental happiness for either of them. But during this long period each of these very remarkable men “came into his kingdom,” and when there was no longer any chance that either of there could warp the nature of the other, fate brought them once more together.

The reconciliation began, of course, with a gracious movement from Bjoernson. At the end of 1880, writing for American readers, Bjoernson had the generous candor to say: “I think I have a pretty thorough acquaintance with the dramatic literature of the world, and I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that Henrik Ibsen possesses more dramatic power than any other play-writer of our day.” When we remember that, in France alone, Augier and Dumas _fils_ and Hugo, Halevy and Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though a sound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said about Ibsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw behind the altar of a Burmese temple, came round to Ibsen’s ears, and this handsome tribute from the rival produced its effect. And when, shortly afterwards, still in America, Bjoernson was nearly killed in a railway accident, Ibsen broke the long silence by writing to him a most cordial letter of congratulation.

The next incident was the publication of _Ghosts_, when Bjoernson, now thoroughly roused, stood out almost alone, throwing the vast prestige of his judgment into the empty scale against the otherwise unanimous black- balling. Then the reconcilement was full and fraternal, and Ibsen wrote from Rome (January 24, 1882), with an emotion rare indeed for him: “The only man in Norway who has frankly, boldly and generously taken my part is Bjoernson. It is just like him; he has, in truth, a great, a kingly soul; and I shall never forget what he has done now.” Six months later, on occasion of Bjoernson’s jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed: “My thanks for the work done side by side with me in the service of freedom these twenty- five years.” These words wiped away all unhappy memories of the past; they gave public recognition to the fact that, though the two great poets had been divided for half a generation by the forces of circumstance, they had both been fighting at wings of the same army against the common enemy.

This, however, takes us for the moment a little too far ahead. After the publication of _The Pillars of Society_, Ibsen remained quiet for some time; indeed, from this date we find him adopting the practice which was to be regular with him henceforth, namely, that of letting his mind lie fallow for one year after the issue of each of his works, and then spending another year in the formation of the new play. Munich gradually became tedious to him, and he justly observed that the pressure of German surroundings was unfavorable to the healthy evolution of his genius. In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although it was no longer the quiet and aristocratic Rome of Papal days, was still immensely attractive to his temperament. He was now, in some measure, “a person of means,” and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formed a small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed, great care. The result could be seen long afterwards by those who visited him in his final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of the sumptuous flat in which he spent his old age and in which he died. His taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of the decline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must be left for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondness for the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only in defiance of Ruskin.

In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was told him of an incident in the Danish courts, the adventure of a young married woman in one of the small towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts running on a new dramatic enterprise. He was still curiously irritated by contemplating, in his mind’s eye, the “respectable, estimable narrowmindedness and worldliness” of social conditions in Norway, where there was no aristocracy, and where a lower middle-class took the place of a nobility, with, as he thought, sordid results. But he was no longer suffering from what he himself had called “the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly black spot.” He went to Amalfi for the summer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with his present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what is probably the most widely famous of all his works, _A Doll’s House_. The day before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublished letter of July 4, 1879): “I have been living here with my family since September last, and most of that time I have been occupied with the idea of a new dramatic work, which I shall now soon finish, and which will be published in October. It is a serious drama, really a family drama, dealing with modern conditions and in particular with the problems which complicate marriage.” This play he finished, lingering at Amalfi, in September, 1879. It was an engineer’s experiment at turning up and draining a corner of the moral swamp which Norwegian society seemed to be to his violent and ironic spirit.

_A Doll’s House_ was Ibsen’s first unqualified success. Not merely was it the earliest of his plays which excited universal discussion, but in its construction and execution it carried out much further than its immediate precursors Ibsen’s new ideal as an unwavering realist. Mr. Arthur Symons has well said [Note: The _Quarterly Review_ for October, 1906.] that “_A Doll’s House_ is the first of Ibsen’s plays in which the puppets have no visible wires.” It may even be said that it was the first modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that even here the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The arm of coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever and entertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of real life. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, dressed to go out, to Helmer’s and the audience’s stupefaction, and when the agitated pair sit down to “have it out,” face to face across the table, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born in drama, and, incidentally, that the “well-made play” has suddenly become as dead as Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of life, are amazing in this final scene, where the old happy ending is completely abandoned for the first time, and where the paradox of life is presented without the least shuffling or evasion.

It was extraordinary how suddenly it was realized that _A Doll’s House_ was a prodigious performance. All Scandinavia rang with Nora’s “declaration of independence.” People left the theatre, night after night, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging. The inner being had been unveiled for a moment, and new catchwords were repeated from mouth to mouth. The great statement and reply–“No man sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves,” “Hundreds of thousands of women have done so!”–roused interminable discussion in countless family circles. The disputes were at one time so violent as to threaten the peace of households; a school of imitators at once sprang up to treat the situation, from slightly different points of view, in novel, poem and drama. [Note: The reader who desires to obtain further light on the technical quality of _A Doll’s House_ can do no better than refer to Mr. William Archer’s elaborate analysis of it (_Fortnightly Review_, July, 1906.)]

The universal excitement which Ibsen had vainly hoped would be awakened by _The Pillars of Society_ came, when he was not expecting it, to greet _A Doll’s House_. Ibsen was stirred by the reception of his latest play into a mood rather different from that which he expressed at any other period. As has often been said, he did not pose as a prophet or as a reformer, but it did occur to him now that he might exercise a strong moral influence, and in writing to his German translator, Ludwig Passarge, he said (June 16, 1880):

Everything that I have written has the closest possible connection with what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personal experience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and purification–for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.

It was in this spirit of unusual gravity that he sat down to the composition of _Ghosts_. There is little or no record of how he occupied himself at Munich and Berchtesgaden in 1880, except that in March he began to sketch, and then abandoned, what afterwards became _The Lady from the Sea_. In the autumn of that year, indulging once more his curious restlessness, he took all his household gods and goods again to Rome. His thoughts turned away from dramatic art for a moment, and he planned an autobiography, which was to deal with the gradual development of his mind, and to be called _From Skien to Rome_. Whether he actually wrote any of this seems uncertain; that he should have planned it shows a certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now in his fifty-third year, he might be nearly at the end of his resources. As a matter of fact, he was just entering upon a new inheritance. In the summer of 1881 he went, as usual now, to Sorrento, and there [Note: So the authorities state: but in an unpublished letter to myself, dated Rome, November 26, 1880, I find Ibsen saying, “Just now I am beginning to exercise my thoughts over a new drama; I hope I shall finish it in the course of next summer.” It seems to have been already his habit to meditate long about a subject before it took any definite literary form in his mind.] the plot of _Ghosts_ revealed itself to him. This work was composed with more than Ibsen’s customary care, and was published at the beginning of December, in an edition of ten thousand copies.

Before the end of 1881 Ibsen was aware of the terrific turmoil which _Ghosts_ had begun to occasion. He wrote to Passarge: “My new play has now appeared, and has occasioned a terrible uproar in the Scandinavian press. Every day I receive letters and newspaper articles decrying or praising it. I consider it absolutely impossible that any German theatre will accept the play at present. I hardly believe that they will dare to play it in any Scandinavian country for some time to come.” It was, in fact, not acted publicly anywhere until 1883, when the Swedes ventured to try it, and the Germans followed in 1887. The Danes resisted it much longer.

Ibsen declared that he was quite prepared for the hubbub; he would doubtless have been much disappointed if it had not taken place; nevertheless, he was disconcerted at the volume and the violence of the attacks. Yet he must have known that in the existing condition of society, and the limited range of what was then thought a defensible criticism of that condition, _Ghosts_ must cause a virulent scandal. There has been, especially in Germany, a great deal of medico- philosophical exposure of the under-side of life since 1880. It is hardly possible that, there, or in any really civilized country, an analysis of the causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest and most conventional forms of hereditary disease could again excite such a startling revulsion of feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew of investigators, Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of probing playwrights all over the Continent, have gone further and often fared much worse than Ibsen did when he dived into the family history of Kammerherre Alving. When we read _Ghosts_ to-day we cannot recapture the “new shudder” which it gave us a quarter of a century ago. Yet it must not be forgotten that the publication of it, in that hide-bound time, was an act of extraordinary courage. Georg Brandes, always clearsighted, was alone in being able to perceive at once that _Ghosts_ was no attack on society, but an effort to place the responsibilities of men and women on a wholesomer and surer footing, by direct reference to the relation of both to the child.

When the same eminent critic, however, went on to say that _Ghosts_ was “a poetic treatment of the question of heredity,” it was more difficult to follow him. Now that the flash and shock of the playwright’s audacity are discounted, it is natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work of pure art, _Ghosts_ stands high among Ibsen’s writings. I confess, for my own part, that it seems to me deprived of “poetic” treatment, that is to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. It is extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as a foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, the characters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types than persons. In the old fighting days it was necessary to praise _Ghosts_ with extravagance, because the vituperation of the enemy was so stupid and offensive, but now that there are no serious adversaries left, cooler judgment admits–not one word that the idiot-adversary said, but–that there are more convincing plays than _Ghosts_ in Ibsen’s repertory.

Up to this time, Ibsen had been looked upon as the mainstay of the Conservative party in Norway, in opposition to Bjoernson, who led the Radicals. But the author of _Ghosts_, who was accused of disseminating anarchism and nihilism, was now smartly drummed out of the Tory camp without being welcomed among the Liberals. Each party was eager to disown him. He was like Coriolanus, when he was deserted by nobles and people alike, and

suffer’d by the voice of slaves to be Whoop’d out of Rome.

The situation gave Ibsen occasion, from the perspective of his exile, to form some impressions of political life which were at once pungent and dignified:

“I am more and more confirmed” [he said, Jan, 3, 1882] “in my belief that there is something demoralizing in politics and parties. I, at any rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its side. Bjoernson says, ‘The majority is always right’; and as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of necessity say, ‘The minority is always right.'”

In order to place this view clearly before his countrymen, he set about composing the extremely vivid and successful play, perhaps the most successful pamphlet-play that ever was written, which was to put forward in the clearest light the claim of the minority. He was very busy with preparations for it all through the summer of 1882, which he spent at what was now to be for many years his favorite summer resort, Gossensass in the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to the memory of Ibsen in the way that Pornic belongs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to Tyndall, holiday homes in foreign countries, dedicated to blissful work without disturbance. Here, at a spot now officially named the “Ibsenplatz,” he composed _The Enemy of the People_, engrossed in his invention as was his wont, reading nothing and thinking of nothing but of the persons whose history he was weaving. Oddly enough, he thought that this, too, was to be a “placable” play, written to amuse and stimulate, but calculated to wound nobody’s feelings. The fact was that Ibsen, like some ocelot or panther of the rocks, had a paw much heavier than he himself realized, and his “play,” in both senses, was a very serious affair, when he descended to sport with common humanity.

Another quotation, this time from a letter to Brandes, must be given to show what Ibsen’s attitude was at this moment to his fatherland and to his art:

“When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is at home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged, a deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might just as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not need poetry at home; they get along so well with the party newspapers and the _Lutheran Weekly_.”

If Ibsen thought that he was offering them “poetry” in _The Enemy of the People_, he spoke in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has never opened its arms wide enough to embrace all imaginative literature as poetry, and in the English sense nothing in the world’s drama is denser or more unqualified prose than _The Enemy of the People_, without a tinge of romance or rhetoric, as “unideal” as a blue-book. It is, nevertheless, one of the most certainly successful of its author’s writings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as a pamphlet it awakens irresistible sympathy; as a specimen of dramatic art, its construction and evolution are almost faultless. Under a transparent allegory, it describes the treatment which Ibsen himself had received at the hands of the Norwegian public for venturing to tell them that their spa should be drained before visitors were invited to flock to it. Nevertheless, the playwright has not made the mistake of identifying his own figure with that of Dr. Stockmann, who is an entirely independent creation. Mr. Archer has compared the hero with Colonel Newcome, whose loquacious amicability he does share, but Stockmann’s character has much more energy and initiative than Colonel Newcome’s, whom we could never fancy rousing himself “to purge society.”

Ibsen’s practical wisdom in taking the bull by the horns in his reply to the national reception of _Ghosts_ was proved by the instant success of _The Enemy of the People_. Presented to the public in this new and audacious form, the problem of a “moral water-supply” struck sensible Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under the lash. _Ghosts_ itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but _The Enemy of the People_ received a cordial welcome, and has remained ever since one of the most popular of Ibsen’s writings. It is still extremely effective on the stage, and as it is lightened by more humor than the author is commonly willing to employ, it attracts even those who are hostile to the intrusion of anything solemn behind the footlights. CHAPTER VII

1883-91

With the appearance of _An Enemy of the People_, which was published in November, 1882, Ibsen entered upon a new stage in his career. He had completely broken with the Conservative party in Norway, without having gratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personal relations of friendliness with Bjoernson, whose generous approval of his work as a dramatist sustained his spirits, but his own individualism had been intensified by the hostile reception of _Ghosts_. His life was now divided between Rome in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, and in the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he wandered solitary, taciturn, absorbed in his own thoughts. His meditations led him more and more into a lonely state. He floated, as on a prophet’s carpet, between the political heavens and earth, capriciously refusing to ascend or to alight. He had come to a sceptical stage in his mental evolution, a stage in which he was to remain for a considerable time, gradually modifying it in a conservative direction. One wonders what the simple- minded and stalwart Bjoernson thought of being quietly told (March 28, 1884) that the lower classes are nowhere liberal-minded or self- sacrificing, and that “in the views expressed by our [Norwegian] peasants there is not an atom more of real Liberalism than is to be found among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol.” In politics Ibsen had now become a pagan; “I do not believe,” he said, “in the emancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidence in the altruism and good will of those in power.” This sense of the uselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next work on which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonic tragi-comedy of _The Wild Duck_. The first sketch of it was made during the spring of 1884 in Rome, but the dramatist took it to Gossensass with him for the finishing touches, and did not perfect it until the autumn. It is remarkable that Ibsen invariably speaks of _The Wild Duck_, when he mentions it in his correspondence, in terms of irony. He calls it a collection of crazy tricks or tomfooleries, _galskaber_, an expression which carries with it, in this sense, a confession of wilful paradox. In something of the same spirit, Robert Browning, in the old days before he was comprehended, used to speak of “the entirely unintelligible _Sordello_,” as if, sarcastically, to meet criticism half-way.

When _The Wild Duck_ was first circulated among Ibsen’s admirers, it was received with some bewilderment. Quite slowly the idea received acceptance that the hitherto so serious and even angry satirist was, to put it plainly, laughing at himself. The faithful were reluctant to concede it. But one sees now, clearly enough, that in a sense it was so. I have tried to show, we imagine Ibsen saying, that your hypocritical sentimentality needs correction–you live in “A Doll’s House.” I have dared to point out to you that your society is physically and morally rotten and full of “Ghosts.” You have repudiated my honest efforts as a reformer, and called me “An Enemy of the People.” Very well, then, have it so if you please. What a fool am I to trouble about you at all. Go down a steep place in Gadara and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, it can amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers Werle. _Vogue la galere_. “But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of the union from the flag,” burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegian politics, “it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway”; it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of my caring. It is in reading _The Wild Duck_ that for the first time the really astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes apparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist now relinquishes any other central object than the presentation to his audience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last, and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that is not catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than _Ghosts_, _The Wild Duck_ is an avalanche which has begun to move, and with a movement unaffected by the incidents of the plot, long before the curtain rises. The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all other modern dramas, depend upon nothing that happens while they are being exhibited, but rush downwards to their inevitable close in obedience to a series of long-precedent impulses. In order to gain this effect, the dramatist has to be acquainted with everything that has ever happened to his personages, and we are informed that Ibsen used to build up in his own mind, for months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was now master of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find one of the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of _The Wild Duck_ that “never before had the poet displayed such an amazing power of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after veil from the past.”

The result of a searching determination to deal with personal and not typical forms of temperament is seen in the firmness of the portraiture in _The Wild Duck_, where, I think, less than ever before, is to be found a trace of that incoherency which is to be met with occasionally in all the earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the effect of a sudden caprice or change of the point of view. There is, so far as I can judge, no trace of this in _The Wild Duck_, where the continuity of aspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us that if we tell him our past, he will tell us our future, and although several of the characters in _The Wild Duck_ are the most sordid of Ibsen’s creations, the author has made himself so deeply familiar with them that they are absolutely lifelike. The detestable Hialmar, in whom, by the looking-glass of a disordered liver, any man may see a picture of himself; the pitiable Gregers Werle, perpetually thirteenth at table, with his genius for making an utter mess of other people’s lives; the vulgar Gina; the beautiful girlish figure of the little martyred Hedvig–all are wholly real and living persons.

The subject of the play, of course, is one which we do not expect, or had not hitherto expected, from Ibsen. It is the danger of “a sick conscience” and the value of illusion. Society may be full of poisonous vapors and be built on a framework of lies; it is nevertheless prudent to consider whether the ideal advantages of disturbing it overweigh the practical disadvantages, and above all to bear in mind that if you rob the average man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob him of his happiness. The topsy-turvy nature of a this theme made Ibsen as nearly “rollicking” as he ever became in his life. We can imagine than as he wrote the third act of _The Wild Duck_, where so horrible a luncheon party–“we’ll all keep a corner”–gloats over the herring salad, he indulged again and again in those puffs of soundless and formidable mirth which Mr. Johan Paulsen describes as so surprising an element of conversation with Ibsen.

To the gossip of that amiable Boswell, too, we must turn for a valuable impression of the solidification of Ibsen’s habits which began about this time, and which marked then even before he left Munich. He had now successfully separated himself from all society, and even his family saw him only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him, but, if sufficiently courageous, must hang about on the staircase, hoping to catch him for a moment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his study, into which the daring Paulsen occasionally ventured, Ibsen, we are to believe, did nothing at all, but “sat bent over the pacific ocean of his own mind, which mirrored for him a world far more fascinating, vast and rich than that which lay spread around him.” [Note: _Samliv med Ibsen_, 1906, p. 30.]

And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafes had begun. In Rome Ibsen had his favorite table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirror in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his gold spectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, and especially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, every couple that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to those untiring eyes. The newspaper and the cafe mirror–these were the books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and out of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could build up a drama. Incessant observation of real life, incessant capture of unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual living experience leaping in his hands like a captive wild animal, this was now the substance from which all Ibsen’s dreams and dramas were woven. Concentration of attention on the vital play of character, this was his one interest.

Out of this he was roused by a sudden determination to go at last and see for himself what life in Norway was really like. A New England wit once denied that a certain brilliant and Europe-loving American author was a cosmopolitan. “No,” he said, “a cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country.” Ibsen began to doubt whether he was not too far off to follow events in Norway–and these were now beginning to be very exciting–well enough to form an independent judgment about them; and after twenty years of exile there is no doubt that the question was fairly put. _The Wild Duck_ had been published in November, 1884, and had been acted everywhere in Scandinavia with great success. The critics and the public were agreed for the first time that Ibsen was a very great national genius, and that if Norway was not proud of him it would make a fool of itself in the eyes of Europe.

Ibsen had said that Norway was a barbarous country, inhabited by two millions of cats and dogs, but so many agreeable and highly-civilized compliments found their way to him in Rome that he began to fancy that the human element was beginning to be introduced. At all events, he would see for himself, and in June, 1885, instead of stopping at Gossensass, he pushed bravely on and landed in Christiania.

At first all went well, but from the very beginning of the visit he observed, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country was thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetorical resolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutional horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway from one end to the other. The King’s veto, the consular difficulty, the Swedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of frenzied discussion, and in none of these did Ibsen take any sort of pleasure. He was not politically far-sighted, it must be confessed, nor did he guess what practical proportions these “theoretical questions” were to assume in the immediate future.

That great writer and delightful associate, the Swedish poet, Count Snoilsky, one of the few whose company never wearied or irritated Ibsen, joined him in the far north. They spent a pleasant, quiet time together at Molde, that enchanting little sub-arctic town, where it looks southward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever guarding the mountainous horizon. Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, when Snoilsky had left him, already thinking of a new drama, lingered on at Molde, spending hours on hours at the end of the jetty, gazing into the clear, cold sea. His passion for the sea had never betrayed him, and at Rome, where he had long given up going to any galleries or studios, he still haunted the house of a Norwegian marine painter, Nils Hansteen, whose sketches reminded him of old days and recollected waters.

But the autumn comes on apace in these high latitudes, and Ibsen had to return to Christiania with its torchlight processions, and late noisy feasts, and triumphant revolutionary oratory. He disliked it extremely, and he made up his mind to go back to the indifferent South, where people did not worry about such things. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of Christiania did not leave him alone. They were not content to have him among them as a retired observer, they wanted to make him stand out definitely on one political side or the other. He was urged, at the end of September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession planned in his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough to see that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably too self-conscious in believing that a trap was being laid for him. He said that, not having observed that his presence gave the Union any great pleasure, he did not care to have its expression of great joy at t his departure. This was not polite, for it does not appear that the students had any idea that he intended to depart. He would not address a reply to the Union as a body, but to “my friends among the students.”

A committee called upon him to beg him to reconsider his resolution, but he roundly told them that he knew that they were reactionaries, and wanted to annex him to their party, and that he was not blind to their tricks. They withdrew in confusion, and Ibsen, in an agony of nervous ness, determined to put the sea between himself and their machinations. Early in October he retreated, or rather fled, to Copenhagen, and thence to Munich, where he breathed again. Meanwhile, the extreme liberal faction among the students claimed that his action had meant that he was heart and soul with them, as against the reactionaries. A young Mr. Ove Rode, who had interviewed him, took upon himself to say that these were Ibsen’s real sentiments. Ibsen fairly stamped with rage, and declared, in furious communications, that all these things were done on purpose. “It was an opportunity to insult a poet which it would have been a sad pity to lose,” he remarked, with quivering pen. A reverberant controversy sprang up in the Norwegian newspapers, and Ibsen, in his Bavarian harbor of refuge, continued to vibrate all through the winter of 1885. The exile’s return to his native country had proved to be far from a success.

Already his new play was taking shape, and the success of his great personal ambition, namely that his son, Sigurd, should be taken with honor into the diplomatic service of his country, did such to calm his spirits. Ibsen was growing rich now, as well as famous, and if only the Norwegians would let him alone, he might well be happy. The new play was _Rosmersholm_, and it took its impulse from a speech which Ibsen had made during his journey, at Trondhjem, where he expounded the gospel of individualism to a respectful audience of workingmen, and had laid down the necessity of introducing an aristocratic strain, _et adeligt element_, into the life of a truly democratic state, a strain which woman and labor were to unite in developing. He said: “I am thinking, of course, not of birth, nor of money, nor even of intellect, but of the nobility which grows out of character. It is _character_ alone which can make us free.” This nobility of character must be fostered, mainly, by the united efforts of motherhood and labor. This was quite a new creed in Norway, and it bewildered his hearers, but it is remarkable to notice how the best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded to the appeal, and how little surprise the present generation would express at a repetition of such sentiments. And out of this idea of “nobility” of public character _Rosmersholm_ directly sprang.

We are not left to conjecture in this respect. In a letter to Bjoern Kristensen (February 13, 1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, while correcting a misconception of the purpose of _Rosmersholm_, that “the play deals with the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have to wage with themselves in order to bring their lives into harmony with their convictions. … Conscience is very conservative. It has its deep roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict.” When we come to read _Rosmersholm_ it is not difficult to see how this order of ideas dominated Ibsen’s mind when he wrote it. The mansion called by that name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois aristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timid conservatism as is represented by Rector Kroll, with his horror of all things new because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in its inherent nobility, is to be superior to a craven horror of the democracy, and is to show, by the courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny, that it looks above and beyond all these momentary prejudices, and accepts, from all hands, whatever is wise and of good report.

The misfortune is that Ibsen, in unconscious bondage to his ideas, did not construct his drama sturdily enough on realistic lines. While not one of his works is more suggestive than _Rosmersholm_, there is not one which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, “criminal, thief and murderess,” as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is a sort of troll; nobody can explain–and yet an explanation seems requisite–what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright for once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of _Rosmersholm_ that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last, Ibsen, in the act of theorizing, loses his hold upon reality. He places his ingenious, elaborate and–given the premises–inevitable denouement in a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately on the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of real life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality of _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that he may leap the further forward.

In other words, _Rosmersholm_ is the proof of Ibsen’s desire to conquer another field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with great severity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was nevertheless ineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of the spectator no other impression than that he was observing something which had actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in which it would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, the principle that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, “like some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times.” But the soul of man cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly prosaic “slices of life” may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut himself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowing how to set about it, that he would once more give the spiritual and the imaginative qualities their place in his work. These had now been excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of _Peer Gynt_, and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again in verse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenile and fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-like bard of sixty. But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, and especially to fantastic beauty of landscape.

The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the old enchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods and the waters which we had lost sight of since _Peer Gynt_. But this element was still more evident in _The Lady from the Sea_, which was. published in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long hours, in the summer of 1885, at the end of the pier at Molde, gazing down into the waters, or watching the steamers arriving and departing, coming from the great sea beyond the fjord or going towards it. As was his wont, he stored up these impressions, making no immediate use of them. He actually prepared _The Lady from the Sea_ in very different, although still marine surroundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for the summer at the pretty and ancient, but very mild little town of Saeby, with the sands in front of him and rolling woods behind. From Saeby it was a short journey to Frederikshavn, “which he liked very much–he could knock about all day among the shipping, talking to the sailors, and so forth. Besides, he found the neighborhood of the sea favorable to contemplation and constructive thought.” So Mr. Archer, who visited him at Saeby; and I myself, a year or two later, picked up at Frederikshavn an oral tradition of Ibsen, with his hands behind his back, and the frock-coat tightly buttoned, stalking, stalking alone for hours on the interminable promenade between the great harbor moles of Frederikshaven, no one daring to break in upon his formidable contemplation.

In several respects, though perhaps not in concentration of effect, _The Lady from the Sea_ shows a distinct advance on _Rosmersholm_. It is never dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and there is thrown over the whole texture of it a glamour of romance, of mystery, of beauty, which had not appeared in Ibsen’s work since the completion of _Peer Gynt_. Again, after the appearance of so many strenuous tragedies, it was pleasant to welcome a pure comedy. _The Lady from the Sea [Note: In the _Neue Rundschau_ for December, 1906, there was published a first draft of _The Lady from the Sea_, dating as far back as 1800.] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defence of individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity of developing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism. It is in some respects the reverse of _Rosmersholm_; the bitterness of restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death, being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and gratified individuality, which leads to health and peace. To the remarkable estimate of _The Lady from the Sea_ formed by some critics, and in particular by M. Jules de Gaultier, we shall return in a general consideration of the symbolic plays, of which it is the earliest. Enough to say here that even those who did not plunge so deeply into its mysteries found it a remarkably agreeable spectacle, and that it has continued to be, in Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popular of its author’s works.

Ibsen left his little tavern at Saeby towards the end of September, 1887, in consequence of an invitation to proceed directly to Stockholm, where his Swedish admirers, now very numerous and enthusiastic, would no longer be deprived of the pleasure of entertaining him publicly. He appeared before them, the breast of his coat sparkling with foreign stars and crosses, the Urim and Thummim of general European recognition. He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out lived all the obscurity of his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries–even in recalcitrant Norway–he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age. In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of the sang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of high and settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was now discussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of what is even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers at Stockholm told him that he had taken a foremost place in re-creating their sense of life, that he was a fashioner and a builder of new social forms, that he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-Builder. The reply he made to their enthusiasm was dignified and reserved, but it revealed a sense of high gratification. Skule’s long doubt was over; he believed at last in his own kingdom, and that the world would be ultimately the better for the stamp of his masterful soul upon its surface.

It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat dreaming through the early part of the uneventful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melancholy when, in the following year, he settled down to the composition of a new play which was to treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He told Snoilsky that for several reasons this work made very slow progress, “and it robbed him of his summer holidays.” From May to November, 1890, he was uninterruptedly in Munich writing what is known to us now as _Hedda Gabler_. He finished it at last, saying as he did so, “It has not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day.” It was a proof of the immense growth of Ibsen’s celebrity that editions of _Hedda Gabler_ were called for almost simultaneously, in the winter of 1890, in London, New York, St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow, as well as in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Christiania. There was no other living author in the world at that moment who excited so much curiosity among the intellectual classes, and none who exercised so much influence on the younger generation of authors and thinkers.

In _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen returned, for the last time, but with concentrated vigor, to the prosaic ideal of his central period. He never succeeded in being more objective in drama, he never kept more closely to the bare facts of nature nor rejected more vigorously the ornaments of romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play. There is no poetic suggestion here, no species of symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, or monster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Archer when he says that he finds it impossible to extract any sort of general idea from _Hedda Gabler_, or to accept it as a satire of any condition of society. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individual that she interested Ibsen. We have been told, since the poet’s death, that he was greatly struck by the case, which came under his notice at Munich, of a German lady who poisoned herself because she was bored with life, and had strayed into a false position. _Hedda Gabler_ is the realization of such an individual case. At first sight, it seemed as though Ibsen had been influenced by Dumas _fils_, which might have been true, in spite of the marked dislike which each expressed for the other; [Note: It is said that _La Route de Thebes_, which Dumas had begun when he died, was to have been a deliberate attack on the methods and influence of Ibsen. Ibsen, on his part, loathed Dumas.] but closer examination showed that Hedda Gabler had no sort of relation with the pamphlets of the master of Parisian problem-tragedy.

The attempt to show that _Hedda Gabler_ “proved” anything was annoying to Ibsen, who said, with more than his customary firmness, “It was not my purpose to deal with what people call problems in this play. What I chiefly tried to do was to paint human beings, human emotions and human fate, against a background of some of the conditions and laws of society as it exists to-day.” The German critics, a little puzzled to find a longitude and latitude for Tesman’s “tastefully decorated” villa, declared that this time Ibsen had written an “international,” not a locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, _Hedda Gabler_ is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen’s plays, and it presents, not of course the highly civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a “west end of Christiania” of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it was that to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than the latter.

A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had special opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately (1907) depicted her as “aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomed to a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom she had mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth. In other circumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good.” If this ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered as the leading example of Ibsen’s often-repeated demonstration, that evil is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and emphasize, as Ibsen’s pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called a caricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him into regions where the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power.

CHAPTER VIII

LAST YEARS

With the publication of _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen passed into what we may call his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of his own growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as the most eminent imaginative writer of the three Scandinavian countries, but as the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of what it would become. In 1880, Norway, the youngest and long the rawest of the three civilizations, was now the foremost in activity, and though the influence of Bjoernson and Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was not to be compared for breadth and complexity with that of Ibsen. The nature of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between 1880 and 1890, that is to say from _Ghosts_ to _Hedda Gabler_, was destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its faded elegance it withered up and vanished.

The next event was that the new generation in the three Northern countries, deprived of its traditional authorities, looked about for a prophet and a father, and they found what they wanted in the exceedingly uncompromising elderly gentleman who remained so silent in the cafes of Rome and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this unseen and unsympathetic personage was extraordinary, and took forms of amazing extravagance. Ibsen’s impassivity merely heightened the enthusiasm of his countless admirers, who were found, it should be stated, almost entirely among persons who were born after his exile from Norway. His writings supplied a challenge to character and intelligence which appealed to those who disliked the earlier system of morals and aesthetics against which he had so long fought single-handed.

Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the position that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, for a time almost exclusively, “serious” aims in literature, and with those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthful minds of any vigor or elasticity.

In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for Ibsen took forms of almost preposterous violence. The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam, has given a curious and amusing account of the rage for Ibsen which came to its height about 1880. The question which every student asked his friend, every lover his mistress, was “What do you think of Ibsen?” Not to be a believer in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which love or friendship might easily be shipwrecked. It was quoted gravely as an insufferable incompatibility for the state of marriage. There was a curious and secret symbolism running through the whole of youthful Swedish society, from which their elders were cunningly excluded, by which the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to hand, presented on solemn occasions, became the emblems of the problems interesting to generous youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty and truth. The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had become clogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sources of emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies, spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it was Ibsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded the emancipation.

The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always according to knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the abuse showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are now describing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian and German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: “Stella Kleve” (Mathilda Malling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen how many “misunderstood” women would leave their homes in imitation of Nora, and how many lovesick housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca, he would have thrown ashes on his head and have retreated into the deserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the tragic circumstance where much was so purely comic. But if there were elements of tragicomedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far more important elements of vigorous and wholesome intellectual independence; and it was during this period of Ibsen’s almost hectic popularity that the foundations of a new fiction and a new drama were laid in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. A whole generation sucked strength and energy from his early writings, since it is to be remarked that, from 1880 to 1890, the great prestige of Ibsen did not depend so much on the dramas he was then producing, as on the earlier works of his poetic youth, now reread with an unexampled fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of Robert Browning, which faintly resembles that of Ibsen, did not attract the younger generation to the volumes which succeed _The Ring and the Book_, but sent them back to the books which their fathers had despised, to _Pippa Passes_ and _Men and Women_. To the generation of 1880, Ibsen was not so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those old but now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, _The Pretenders_, _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.

In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strong personal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did he find it confined to Scandinavia. He had travelled about in Germany, and everywhere his plays were being acted. Berlin was wild about him; at Weimar he was feted like a conqueror. He did not settle down at Munich until May, and here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer, hard at work. After the success of _Hedda Gabler_, which overpowered all adverse comment, Ibsen began to long to be in Norway again, and this feeling was combined, in a curious way, with a very powerful emotion which now entered into his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful existence, mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himself to the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desert in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams. No adventure, of any prominent kind, had ever been seen to diversify Ibsen’s perfectly decorous and domestic career. And now he was more than sixty, and the gray tones were gathering round him more thickly than ever, when a real ray of vermilion descended out of the sky and filled his horizon with color.

In the season of 1889, among the summer boarders at Gossensass, there appeared a young Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach. She used to sit on a certain bench in the Pferchthal, and when the poet, whom she adored from afar, passed by, she had the courage to smile at him. Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon Ibsen was on the bench at her side. He readily discovered where she lived; no less readily he gained an introduction to the family with whom she boarded. There was a window-seat in the _salle a manger_; it was deep and shaded by odorous flowering shrubs; it lent itself to endless conversation. The episode was strange, the passion improbable, incomprehensible, profoundly natural and true. Perhaps, until they parted in the last days of September, neither the old man nor the young girl realized what their relations had meant to each. Youth secured its revenge, however; Miss Bardach soon wrote from Vienna that she was now more tranquil, more independent, happy at last. Ibsen, on the other hand, was heart-broken, quivering with ecstasy, overwhelmed with joy and despair.

It was the enigma in his “princess,” as he called her; that completed Miss Bardach’s sorcery over the old poet. She seems to have been no coquette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at his feet; she broke the thread which bound the charms of her spirit and poured them over him. He, for his part, remaining discreet and respectful, was shattered with happiness. To a friend of mine, a young Norwegian man of letters, Ibsen said about this time: “Oh, you can always love, but I am happier than the happiest, for I am beloved.” Long afterwards, on his seventieth birthday, when his own natural force was failing, he wrote to Miss Bardach, “That summer at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the most harmonious portion of my whole existence. I scarcely venture to think of it, and yet I think of nothing else. Ah! forever!” He did not dare to send her _The Master-Builder_, since her presence interpenetrated every line of it like a perfume, and when, we are told, she sent him her photograph, signed “Princess of Orangia,” her too-bold identification of herself with Hilda Wangel hurt him as a rough touch, that finer tact would have avoided. There can be no doubt at all that while she was now largely absorbed by the compliment to her own vanity, he was still